The Jackson Legacy

 My childhood was spent in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950’s.

Back in that day, life was different in the Old South. 

I mean, it had been less than a century since President Abraham Lincoln had stood in the Courthouse door and declared that the rebel southern states would not be allowed to separate themselves from this Union just because they so stubbornly insisted on keeping slaves. 

During the course of that ensuing war, the Civil War, known in some southern quarters as the “war of northern aggression”, our Union Army had defeated the rebel insurrectionists and delivered this nation back into the hands of President Lincoln and back into the legacy of American Liberty and Justice for All.

A century later, as I was growing up in Jackson, Mississippi in the ’50’s, there was an American patriot, Medgar Evers—who had joined our US Army during World War II, and had defended the free world against the hitler nazis in Europe. After World War II, Medgar then returned to his home in Jackson, where he prolonged his fight for Freedom by leading his black brethren toward voter registration. This was during the pointy-headed, fiery cross terrorism of the jim-crow South. But Brother Medgar's defense of freedom was tragically terminated when when he was shot dead in his own front yard in Jackson because he was guiding his brethren black folk toward voter registration. (I later wrote about that in my novel, King of Soul).

That honky capitol city of Mississippi had been named after President Andrew Jackson, who had served as US President from 1929 to 1837.

A century and a half after President Jackson, along came a civil rights fireball, Jesse Jackson, whose bold activism at North Carolina A&T University—just down the road from where I live—was laid into the foundation of the 20th-century American Liberty project, back in the day, 1950’s-60’s, when I was coming of age. 

Now, as I grow old, 72, along comes the Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who stands up for the grand Liberty legacy of Jesse, Medgar and many other profile-in-courage Americans who defend our American civil rights against the slings and arrows of outrageous magamaniac abuse. 

So here comes Justice Jackson, defending the preservation of our American liberty against the onslaught of magamania and the fairytale notion of  immunity for chief-insurrectionist trump. She poses her probing question in this week’s trump-immunity Supreme Court hearing. Justice Jackson asked the maga lawyer: 

“If someone with those kinds of powers (immunity)—the most powerful person in the world, with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes . . . I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into. . . the seat of criminal activity in this country.” 

My objective here is to express appreciation and moral support for Justice Jackson, whose insightful probing proves that she is still dedicated to the cause of Justice, while others of her privileged Supreme Court colleagues seem to be striving pretentiously to protect the fairytale privileges of the chief insurrectionist  instead upholding protection of our .Gov of the people, by the people and for the People.

Keep it up, Justice Jackson-- your vigilant protection of American Justice! 

King of Soul

I Yam the LawFuss

 Veteran Federal Judge Michael Luttig has compared the Supreme Court’s recent trump-immunity session to Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned.

Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas have demonstrated that they are living in a dream-world of hyper-theoretical Law while. . . in the real world, trump is on the edge of scuttling away from his disastrous January 6 declaration of war on our US Constitution.

Those four Justices’ insensitive preoccupation with theoretical precedent-setting—instead of administering Justice to arrest and punish trump’s criminal incitement— brought to my mind an image of John Lennon’s “walrus” metaphor in his weird song, “I am the Walrus.”

So I have used Lennon’s poetic framework and bizarre imagery as  framework to compose a new diatribe . . . as present-day protest intensifies nationwide to shock those four insensitive Bench-sitters into an awareness of what is going out here in the real world.  Out here in the hinterlands that stretch from sea to shining sea, we citizens are expected to live according to the Law of the land and we expect our presidents to do the same.

    If you are an ole boomer like me, perhaps you imagine the original "tune" as you read:

They are they as we are we as we were once together.

But See how they speak like babble from a gavel see how they pry

We crying.

Sitting in the Courtroom, waiting for their word to come

Corporation mag-shirt, judgy sludgy bench blurt blurt!

Judge, you been a haughty bench  you let your grace expire

I am the edge-man; they are the sledge men.

I am the LawFuss! , goo-goo-ga shoo. 

Misters sitting judge-men, lumpy-dumpy-rumpies in a row

See how they judge like lucy with a grudge see how we cry

We crying. yeah we be crying.

We crying. yeah we be crying.

Yellow legal custard, dripping from a dread judge eye

Crabby like a dishrag, perpendic’lar pressrag

Ahoy, you spin a haughty furl, you let your briefs droop down

We be the Edge-men; they be the sludge men; goo-goo-ga shoo.

We be on a Justibus yea yu yu so crude we d’do-do do feud wit yoo!

Expert textbert crawyer lawyers!

Don’t you know We People  cry at you?

See how you judge like robes fulla  grudge, see how u spin

We crying.

Maga-mentry trumpsquirts, climbing up the Cap’tol Dome

Now jukamentary pen-gun adjudicating bucksboss drone

Your honor shoulda seen them kicking ole Abe Lincoln

I am the dead-man they are the dread-men

I am the LawTrust. Do-do-yu rude while we d’du du du feud

wit' yu, what's it tuya?

Glass Chimera

That Time That Was

There had never been anything like it in history . . . until it happened:

America, in victorious optimism after that “Second” world war.

I mean, the “First” world war was just a warmup apocalypse for what came in 1939-45.

It seemed, in the ’40’s, that the krauts had not learned their lesson, which they should have learned in 1918. Two decades later, the Beast spirit took a hold of a lunatic corporal who dragged the world, for the second time, into hell-on-earth for half a decade. 

Then our guys, under the leadership of Eisenhower, Patton, McArthur and thousands of other brave soldier who went over to the Continent of our cultural heritage and ran them third-reich nazis back into their holes, in the ground or into the judgements of History in a Nuremberg trial and, and . . .

And then, there we were sittin’ on top of the world, "one nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All!,  victorious from Normandy to Potsdam to the Philippines, all the way over to Pearl Harbor, where, for us, it had all started on that fateful day of infamy. . . back in '41 it was. And then four years of hell on (European and Pacific) earth. 

And then it happened happened: The Golden Age. California! Hollywood, Broadway, batons twirling in the air on Main Street from sea to shining sea. . . Ike, TV,  Davy Crockett, Micky and Minnie, Ozzie and Harriet, Superman, Elvis, Nat King Cole, Louie Armstrong, Motown,  Kennedy: “Let them come to Berlin”. . . to see the difference between the way WE do things and the way THEY do things! Later, Reagan challenged Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall.   And then they tore down their damn wall.

With a little help from the Brits we discovered a new strain of English poetry, set to the thumpin’ beat of this new thing called Rock ’n Roll, which the Fab Four had borrowed from our good ole boys . . .

Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, reflecting ancient African strains of laboring black fingers  a-pluckin’ the future of popular music out of a six-stringed, woman-shaped box with a hole and a neck on it, vibrating blue notes sung and plucked by the field-worn magic hands of many a long-gone Miss’ippi sharecropper somewhere down in the delta.

And then, and then, after the big war . . . as brother Don sang it. . . “there we were, all in one place, a generation lost in space. . .

Space! Imagine that! John Glenn . . . Neil Armstrong,Yeah! I remember!

America! We hardly knew ye!  Oh, wait! You’re still here. Let’s celebrate, American style! Wanna dance?!  Get started with kingofkungfu!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtIl1CGRu4M 

Glass half-Full 

The Arcane Conundrum

Erotica is nice and surely will suffice

while Esoterica glimmers through History’s roll of the dice;

History’s luck of the draw rolls up random events

ever since our ancestors lived in tents.

Yet some ancient wind of prescient detection

seems to accompany certain adventures of erection.

As men’s adventures grow up and harden

children are born through woman’s garden.

All of which cultivates that famous spice of life

bringing relief from our long trail of strife. 

A tale is told, although I comprehend it not

Of how in ancient times wise men begot

a scriptive tale of what men forgot

As Life’s challenges demanded interventions,

men lost site of their best intentions.

Even so

on with the show:

as billy shears sang twenty years ago

Or whatever;

nobody’s forever.

But I digress;

now I regress.

As I was saying:

before the watchers’ braying,

People brought forth wisdom with invention.

although we know not their intentions.

Blake came along with a glimmer

as he did catch a signal from Swedenborgian splendor.

Nostradamus surely had an esoteric handle

shining brightly within history’s long-lit candle.

Some say his prescience was born of akashic wonder

even as his quatrains sounded historic thunder. 

Blavatsky’s illumination of those akashic glimmerings

seemed somehow to cast up of esoteric shimmerings. 

As knowledge grew and push came to shove

historians donned their analytical gloves;

Although the solid grounds of historical enquiry

don’t hold a candle to Esoterica’s querkic diary.

Perhaps the tale of the Western quest,

which expanded with each historian guest

Began with Enoch’s un-canonic book

by which he was permitted to look

Into the arcane realm.

Who’s at the helm?

Wouldn’t we like to know!

I don’t really wanna stop the show

so I though y’all might like to know:

What’s going on down under you?

is it old hat or deja vu?

Guided by the Captain of our Souls

or the Joker with a million holes?

I mean Blavatsky took the dark side

and as each traveler came along to ride

He or she had to decide

to accept humility or amp up pride.

This is no new thing, you understand:

whether to heed self-will or divine command.

What you do with what you know

to reveal for Lord or flaunt your show.

In days of Old, Daniel knew his own allegiance,

to discern the side of Watcher angels’ obeisance.

Whether the Messenger’s servitude was Light

or whether ’t’was of the darkened blight.

As for Nostradamus’ path of Bright or dim . . .

still trying to make up my mind about him.

Selah.

Glass Chimera 

The Old Tree and the New Search

While I am getting old, we do have a granddaughter who is quite new (5) to this world. A few days ago, we were in Fort Lauderdale with her on a pirate ship.

Yes, a Pirate Ship is in the harbor there where you can cruise around for an hour and be amused by the monologue of Captain Black Sparrow and his sidekick Neverland Jack. It was fabulous. I wouldn't trade it for a davy jones locker full of fake doubloons.

I thought about those two Pirates, because, as I was about to write this essay, which would be about springtime and an old tree that Tolstoy mentioned in War and Peace, I had to turn to Google for a reference or two.

So, there I am, one little googly pirate-plundering maneuver after another, trolling online  for some literary treasure of buried information . . . whereupon I was guided by Sergy and Larry’s magic wand to the information for which I was searching.

I found it in the New Yorker, Nov 2007, in an article, Movable Types.  In the course of his long article about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, James Wood provided an exact quote of the scene I was looking for. 

The snippet of memory in my mind that had propelled my search to this point of world memory was a scene in which Prince Andrei sees something very special (and this is the phrase I remember from the War and Peace move) a “tree with which we agreed.”

Here's how Wood illumined Tolstoy's twice-seasoned experience:

“ a great, gnarled oak, surrounded by trees already succumbing to spring. He (Prince Andrei feeling at that moment somewhat depressed) feels like the oak: it seems to say , “Spring, and love, and happiness . . . senseless deception!”. . . But,  returning a month later, he cannot at first identify the oak, because it has leafed out like all the other trees.”

In the story of War Peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, feeling defeated, had "agreed" with the old tree when it was hesitating to join in with the younger trees' celebration of spring. But a month later, hey!, even old growths sprout a leaf or two (thousand) when spring time rolls around.   Life goes on, even when we get old and grumpy, haha!

So I did pirate the info and the quote from James Wood, who had discovered it buried in Leo Tolstoy's masterful literary treasure. Such is the Search and the Looting of meaningful blog-prospects in our 21st century web of wonder. Read 'em and weep for appreciation!

Glass half-Full 

Two Prophetic Paths?

 Messages future/past had come to Nostradamus

Casting quatrains of mystery among us, 

with glimmerings from some akashic world

where, among the stars unfurled

a tale is told both future/past

with mystery as to what comes first or last.

I’m just perplexed at this movie screen

that seems so real and yet, a dream

but revealing future acts

as if they were ancient facts

laying quite a puzzle upon my mind

about this riddling mystery called “Time.”

Is it front or is it back?

Is it potential or is it fact?

How a prophet could discern future deeds

performed by men of their own free will,

not determined by some pre-set bill?

On the esoteric side there’s Nostradamus;

I cannot comprehend his role among us.

How could he pen poems of future acts

that turn out to be historical facts

centuries later! Is time a crater?

Back in the Mosaic Book

’t’was written guard angels were assigned

to guard the gates of Edenic mind

so foolish Man. . . never more could

see the the tree of knowledge, evil and the good.

So I surmise these guard angels still do stand

somewhere to obstruct the deeds of destructive Man.

Maybe so that. . . when we had split the atom

we could not repeat the mistake of Adam

and blow this world to smithereens

even though we do strive for Green

which may be, anyway, just a hopeful dream,

if Vlad the Mad gets too flustered

and launches up a big atom-buster.

 

Two prophetic paths diverged in a darkened world

one cloaked in mystery, the other quite unfurled.

Not wanting to travel both

I chose the path of Faithful oath

to tread the path in Daylight;

and though the deep zodiac be bright

I find comfort in deep sleep at night,

sleep that knits the ravel’d sleeve of care

to soothe the souls that in future acts do dare.

Selah.

Glass half-Full

New Story of The Old

 I have decided to launch into my fifth novel. . .

In bright autumn morning sunshine, Noal descended stairs from his little apartment. The daily street-level traipse of nine blocks brought him through a few downtown streets of the Blue Ridge mountain town of  Ultramont. To Inland Press he would traipse, and his office desk, from whence he would conduct business that would change the world, or at least he liked to think so. A journey of a thousand miles, or a thousand years, has to start somewhere. 

  Walking past that familiar old white clapboard mansion, Noal paused for a moment to ponder, for the umpteenth time, the soft stone face of an angel. 

A hundred or so years ago, Elizabeth Finch—enterprising lady that she was— had been supervising the arrangement of her life-project, Mountain Aire Homestead. She had instructed the gardeners to place the angel in the yard, in front of her little mansion project.

Whenever Noal would amble by the angel, he could not help but retrieve in his mind some age-old memory. Whether the flicker was his own imagination, or some ancestral snippet, retrieved from some person, place or thing of long ago, maybe even far away , he had not yet determined. But hey, who knows about such things? Maybe someone, somewhere, understood. He was still trying to figure it all out. 

Maybe the angel, or the idea of an angel, had drifted down from heaven. God forbid that it might have trummeled up from the nether regions. 

Noal had never seen a real angel anyway, so how could he know? He was not even certain that such a thing as an angel exists. I mean, he had been taught, from an early age, that there was such a thing as an angel. It was known to be the celestial being that had stood, with its angel-twin, just outside the gates of Eden after Adam and Even had been banished because they had screwed up when they heeded the counsel of that frickin’ ole serpent who had been hanging around trying to stir up trouble, before he finally managed to bust through the Elohim hegemony with his apple trick.  

The guard angels, outside the garden, had been assigned from on high.   

Their duty--or so it was written-- was to prevent Adam and Eve from getting back into the special venue, wherein they had been birthed into the physical world, but then later ejected,  in a time so long ago and so far away. But this is a delicate subject.

Yes, 't'was so long ago, and so far away, in a garden far, far away from this place.  Moses had, back in the day, given an account of it.  Noal would be perplexed to find the manner in which he would—or even could—contemplate the ancient account of what had had happened in times past. Furthermore, how, now, could he find, or carve out? a niche of his own in this present arrangement. . . as he was strolling to work that fateful morning.

(to be continued)

King of Soul

The Peril of An Emperor

 Napolean Bonaparte had a nephew, known as Napolean III, who was elected President of France in 1848.

Later, in our modern era, 2001,  historian David Ovason gives an account of Napolean III’s accession to power and his later demise: 1848-1870. 

Ovason’s report on Napolean III is found in chapter 4 of  his book, The Secrets of Nostradamas, published through Harper Collins in 2001.

In chapter 5, David  Ovason wrote:

“When elected to the Presidency, (Napolean III) he swore an oath to remain faithful to the democratic Repubulic, even while working to overthrow this by having himself made Emperor. This aim he achieved by stealth, finally by coup.”

Reporting further, in that book mentioned above, on the Napolean III reign, David Ovason explained more in his book about the course of Napolean III’s destructive leadership among the French people:

“On December 2, 1851, after exertions to ensure that his own conspirator-supporters were established in important positions of power, he carried out his coup, and was declared Emperor a year later. after he was raised to a position where he might exercise that absolute by which he was corrupted even more. . . 

“Napolean changed laws to weaken the positions of the republicans and resorted to wholesale deportation of his political enemies, while his cudgel-bearing secret police, the ratapoils, terrorized the republicans. When the Empire fell (partly due to Napolean III’s incompetence at ((the battle of)) Sedan in 1870), the Bordeaux Assembly recognized the extent of the crimes and tyranny of renard Napolean III, declaring him responsible for the ruin, invasion and dismemberment of France.”

My question:  Does any of this sound relevant to our present situation in America, where we have the original—the very first, in 1776— Republic of the modern Age— a Republic that was founded only 18 years before the original French Republic?

Are we witnessing historical insurrection, Napoleonic style, being repeated in 2024, trumpian style? 

God forbid! Sacre Bleu! May it never be.

Glass half-Full

Riding the Rails of Time

 Way back yonder in time. . . back in the day, the Brits came up with a thing called a railroad. It was a mighty amazing beast.

I mean, it looked like a beast, huffin’ and puffin’ and blowin’ off steam while rollin’ along on a steel rail like nobody had ever seen before. 

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

As time rolled on, their upstart yankee brethren, cousins and heirs in America, joined the great importation of industry into human history; the outcome was a thing called the industrial revolution. There’s a lot could be said about that, but today I’m a-thinkin’ about the railroad’s impact on even older human invention: music

Way back in the annals and the windmills of my baby-boomer memory there’s a whole a train-yard of trains rollin’ through my Rowland memory.

The first one I can remember is “I’ve  been working on the Railroad, all the live-long day. . . Can’t you hear the whistle blowin. . .” Then there’s the juvenile-sounding “Freight train, freight train, goin’ down the track.” 

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

And I remember, back in the day, 1950's, layin’ in bed at night, with  transistor radio tuned into the darkness and here comes the voice of Brook Benton singing “Rainy Night in Georgia”:  he’s hobo’in’ on a boxcar. . .where

"the distant moanin’ of a train seems to send a sad refrain through the night. . .“so I take my guitar”. . . “It’s a rainy night in Georgia. . . Lord, I believe it’s rainin’ all over the world.”

On a lighter note, there’s the ole “Chattanooga Choochoo” from back in ’30’s or somewhere. . . not to mention (although I will) so many other classics: Wreck of the Old ’97, Orange Blossom Special, Wabash Cannonball.

When my generation came along, we were inspired to hear a highly commendable batch of contributions to the rail-song legacy. . . Peter Paul and Mary’s plaintive voice as she so tunefully lamented . . .

. . ."If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.  .  . you can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles."

By ’n by, that steam-belching beast became the inspiration for all kinds of historical developments. So, along with the railroads,  the Brits rolled out a whole host of industrial and economic innovations that changed the world forever.

 But movin' right along on the American side, I cherish Steve Goodman’s masterpiece, City of New Orleans,  performed so admirably by Arlo Guthrie, after Arlo’s pappy, Woody, had sung, back in the day, a whole car-load of railroad (and other) good ole songs. Later on down the timeline, the Doobie Brothers cranked up their “Long Train Runnin’”, one of the greatest rock rhythms that ever rolled down a songway rail.

 And I shan’t neglect to mention Casey Jones. And what about ole John Henry swingin’ his way into railway history. . . and Tom and Dick Smothers blowin’ comical commentary hot air about the intercontinental railway being joined up at Promontary Point Utah

, where, as brutha Tommy used to tell it, they "drove a big golden spike" to commemorate the Union of East and West by way of the Railway.

Meanwhile, up at the maple leaf coast-to-coast nation, there’s Gordon Lightfoot rollin’ up his absolutely profound Canadian Railroad Trilogy.

I mean, there were so many of them that, long about 1977, I had to roll my contribution into that long train of rail songs. Listen:

Underground Railroad

Ecliptical Rant

 Here comes the sun

chasing the dark side of the moon.

The joker tried to chase away our American tune.

The joker tried to turn our Dome to Doom!

But Oh say can you see, in the 2121 light?

What we so proudly maintained after your riotous fight!

Why’d you have to screw it all up?

We had a good thing going till you showed up.

Now it’s us v them

what used to be peaceable  repub v  dem

Now we got a elephant throwin’ his weight around

Tearing our American dream down.

Washington prob’ly turnin’ over in his grave

home of the brave now riot for the knave.

Us and them all over again

though we’re just ordinary men.

Now here come the sun chasing the dark side of the moon

Figure it out pal; it time you change yer tune.

I mean why’d you have to get contentious

instigating magas to be so dam vicious?

I mean w’ere trying to assemble a team here

to work together toward  American dream so dear

to us

In God we trust!

Hop on the bus Gus

Drop you plans for Capitol bust!

in land of free,  home of the brave

not the battleground of the knave.

I mean there we were with one small step for a man and

you perverted the leap with  your command

So we don’t have a decent country any more

cuz you busted open that insurrection door!

You violated the liberty of our open door;

you dragged in that babylon hoar

cuz you just had to put on your 5th ave suit

and step out there and shoot

our Rule of Law

now with open wound made raw

yeah, you, with your elliptical rant

But we be insisting you can’t

get away with it!

We shan’t let you do it any more

cuz this aint 5th Avenue with busted golden door.

This is America!

not heretica.

You aint in jersey shore no more donnie boy.

This nation aint your casino toy!

Oh donnie boy the pipes the pipes are calling

while your insurrection gangs are falling!

In our Courts they be going down

cuz you took your shot from downtown.

The rioters be goin down like flies

as maga Court defenses  dies

They be squirmin in them prison cells

They be repenting from their rebel hells.

So you think the mouth shall rise again?!

Think again my friend.

Cuz Jack Smit he be jump'in o'er your cannon trick

after your failed rendition of  worn-out plan like tricky dick.

No not here this ain't no watergate re-run

sneakin 'round with fakey delegate plans undone!

Its all over but the shoutin’

Yeah yeah yeah hush yer pountin'.

Glass half-Full

Good Ole Mel

 Mel Brooks? Mel Gibson? Mel Torme? Melchizedek?

Yeah,that’s it. Melchizedek. It all goes back to good ole Mel, Melchizedek, whoever he was.

When you’re an ole guy,72,  like me, you have all these unidentifiable names, images, phrases, vaguely remembered snippets of this, that and the other floating around in your head. 

Maybe the cinematic recorder in my babyboomer head was ringing up some neuronic association of a hollywood producer who had floated images into my head, or maybe some necktie-bound, old-school nightclub singer who had crooned  love-song hopes into my brain while I was watching Ed Sullivan show, back in the day before we had the Web, back in the day when we had a boobtube in the living room.

Maybe that was it. Maybe that’s what I was thinking of . . or 

Maybe it goes back further than that. . . Melchizedek?

Who was that guy anyway? Some important guy that Abraham had met back in the day, back in the wayback Torah movies. You know, the ones where Moses parted the waters so his enslaved people could escape slavery and enter the promised land. 

Promised land? Good luck with that. I mean, you can’t take this stuff too seriously. . . you’re liable to get flung into the concentration camp, or worse, the gas chamber,  or neglected at the oscars or neglected at the grammys or maybe just pass into mediocrity, the veils of history, forgotten forever like your granny, or maybe remembered in some museum somewhere.

Did I say “promised land”? Yeah, that’s the place that Moses caught a glimpse of before the Lord took him to the real promised place. That’s the place that Dr. King caught a glimpse of before the magamaniacs shot him dead the next day. 

Wait, I remember now. That’s the place that Abraham went to when he left the old country, when he somehow managed to escape Auschwitz and jump on a boat that took him to New York harbor where he caught a glimpse of Lady Liberty, who was, methinks, Abraham’s cousin, and then he got off the boat and settled in the lower east side for awhile.

And then I think he headed west again, all the way to the newest version of promised land, California.

Yeah, that was it; that’s what I was thinking of. . . Mel in Hollywood. It all comes back to me now. How can I forget about good ole Mel? I catch a glimpse of his work every time that promised land crosses mind, every time I sit in my easy chair and look at my back yard, my own little promised land, my own little acreage that I was bequeathed, having driven a stake in the ground and declared that God and the county.gov granted it to me, after I had paid my dues and taken a few turns on the great mandala.

I mean, we paid for it, me and my wife, back in the day. Maybe one of these days I’ll leave it all behind and go see Abraham, Martin and John and. . . and Mel. Maybe I’ll meet Plato and we’ll talk about the shadows on the wall. Maybe I’ll meet Pythagoras and we'll talk about triangles and Trinity and the good ole days back in the old country. Maybe I'll catch up with Mel himself. We'll sit in chairs and reminisce.

Maybe one day! Yeah, that’s it. I believe it could happen, at least that’s what Mel’s great-great nephew said after he walked out of the tomb on Sunday morning. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of. 

Hope to see you there! 

Glass half-Full

George Harrison's Weeping Guitar

 When you get old, like me, you reminisce a lot. . . or, as Sonny Bono, sang it: remonisce.

I mean, I can still remember the day I was out in our Baton Rouge yard, mowing our lawn in 1967, racing through it so that I could get back into—as the Beach Boys had so perfectly harmonized it—“in my room, in my room”—where I could listen to the Beatles’ brand new Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We had no idea what it . . .

When I had finished the mowing, I retreated to the inner sanctum, cranked up the ancient “record-player”(about the size of a suitcase, dark wood casing with a dark fabric panel in front to soften the sound) and suddenly there’s Ringo singin’. . .

“What would you think if I sang out of tune, if I stand up and walk out on you?   Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song and I’ll try not to sing out of key. I get by with a little help from me friends. . .”

It all comes back to me now. Who the heck is Billy Shears? What is going on here? Whatever happened to:   "She was just seventeen; you know what I mean, and the way she looked . . ."

And for that matter. . . who is Sgt. Pepper? (. . . we were wondering, at first. If you’re not a baby boomer, don’t worry; you’d have to have been there. . .) Even so, stay with me. There's a media/cultural history lesson to be learned from us old folk.

Paul McCartney expressed the feeling well on that Sgt. Pepper album, even though he was a young dude at the time:

“I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in and stops my mind from wandering. . .”

But now,  in this case, I'm going to fix a hole by allowing my mind to wander a bit. Wander with me.

So now, 57 years later, I’m getting a few answers. They’re out there in the 21st-century version of boobtube/idiotbox. . . the internet. Here’s some guy telling me all about the contentions that those fab four guys were going through back in the day. Turns out, it was no  walk in the park, certainly no Hyde Park, no strawberry fields forever. It was, in fact, most of the time, a hard day’s night for Beatle George, tolerating the power-tripping (ha! tripping, get it?) manipulations of John and Paul, but mostly Paul. 

I mean, I always knew—or at least I had figured out by, say, the 1980’s, that Paul was the real spark plug of that band. He was the real music guy, the real control freak, which is why, I suppose,  John could start a highly contagious rumor that Paul was. . . barefooted, or no longer of this world or. . . something like that. Paul and John had this quite effective good guy-bad guy public melodrama going on; it rendered them a powerfully productive public image that ultimately took them around the world and back. 

Well, as it turned out, in 1967, Ringo was opening that first Sgt. Pepper invitational anthem with the “if I sang out of tune” soliloquy (see lyrics above) by belting it out so bravely on behalf of his fellow-Beatle, George, because—come to find out—George was, all along, and for all fab-four time, the beaten-down Beatle.

I just watched an online behind-the-scenes exposition of that sad-but-true, chronic Starr-Harrison, shared rejection scenario.  It ain't easy backing up the dynamic Lennon/McCartney duo: one song-writer genius and one working class hero with a flair for outrageous poetry and showmanship. ( In one performance, while performing for the Queen, John had released the audience from any obligation to clap by explaining they could just "rattle your jewels.")

Anyway, getting back to 2024, the musician/documentarian James Hargreaves pulls back, online, a time/media curtain to reveal the sad-but-true saga of George with his faithful drummer friend Ringo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEKwAv3cKYU&t=601s 

 As it turns out, George really was the neglected genius, a guitar wizard hidden behind the curtain, among that fabulous four genii.

". . .with every mistake we must surely be learning."

I mean, we always knew that George was the quiet one, possibly even the neglected—the unappreciated— one. As it turns. . .  he was. He was the tortured soul who really meant it when he later sang the hauntingly  beautiful, profound—even Shakespearian-level tragedy—musical lament :  While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJDJs9dumZI

". . .with every mistake we must surely be learning." Thank you, George, wherever you are.

King of Soul

What Violence Descends Into

 Long about the 1600’s, and into the 1700’s, the Western world began to change in very big way. People started to think a lot more, ponder new economic ideas, revise old philiosphies, and invent new devices. 

We are talking here mostly about Europe, as the New World was still at that time, mostly wilderness, although we Americans were certainly destined to ultimately play a huge role in all the changes that brought about the modern world. 

That period of time is called the Enlightenment. The ideas of Life, Liberty and the  Pursuit of Happiness represented a progressive development in the conduct of governments and industries. Our American version was represented in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the steady development of our American government. 

A very important development in Europe was the industrial revolution. This progress brought into plain view a certain characteristic of civilization that has always been true, but became even more intense in the Industrial age: the rich get richer and the poor take a while to catch up, if they ever do.

Back in the 1830’s, Karl Marx noticed this and pointed out that, in the new order of things, this widening differentiation was intensifying into a confrontation between the people who do the work and the people who run the show. The workers he called proletariat; owners he called capitalists. 

Well, this philosophical/economic division has, since that time, evolved into a major identity differentiation that is oversimplified in the terms, the Left and the Right. Another loosely categorized expression of it has evolved to Democratv. Republican.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What I really want to write about here is use of violence of either side to try to impose their program on the rest of us.

Looking back again to the Marxian analysis: as that developed, history witnessed the issue of violence used as a means of imposing progress. 

In early 20th-century Russia, the Bolsheviks harnessed some wild ideas to the extreme economic and military extremities of that time. There was a dispute about tactics in which, ultimately the strong man won the whole kitnkaboodle.

Josef Stalin, with his ruthlessness, prevailed over Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky was sent packing; Stalin took control and set up trials in the ’30’s which led to an oppressive system of gulag prisons.(which Solzhenitzen wrote about) Josef Stalin was a bully who grabbed the Marxist idealogues by the balls and twisted Communism into authoritarian Fascism. So Stalin was a bad-boy dictator.

Meanwhile, down in Germany, an even more bruthal badass was mustering up a wehrmacht to out-do the Russian bully-bear.

Hitler was cunning, even more cruel that Stalin. He didn’t think twice about telling lies; he was the father of 20th-century strong-man fascism, a master of deception. He set up the most massive killing administration that the world have ever seen—the final solution  of the third reich, a Holocaust to kill all the Jews and other critics of nazi extremities.

Hitler made a deal with Stalin in 1939, not to attack Russia. Good luck with that, thought the civilized people of Europe. Then hitler reversed himself two years later. and attacked Russia anyway.  

That’s what bullies do. This gets around to my main point. As these Left v Right confrontations intensify—and then degenerate into real enmity, the tough guys are always behind the scenes waiting for their opportunity to turn civilized politics into violent overthrow. The stalinists took over Russia; the nazis took over Germany. The maoists took over China. The Viet Cong took over Vietnam. blah blah blah. . .

 Violence, in 20th and 21st century infrastructure, ultimately descends into violent insurrection, if not—dare we say it—civil war.  God forbid it doesn’t happen here. 

I mean, (wake up!) it already did . . . on January 6 2021.

Never again!

All ye Constitution-abiding Americans, do not allow the magas to follow their chief insurrectionist (see our 14th Amendment, Section 3) into a violent overthrow of our Constitutional Republic. They already had one failed attempt. The so-called Right-wingers are disposing of their classic conservatism (which was legitimate) and permitting the loudest bully on the block to incite them into a (blahblahblah) abuse of 2nd-amendment rights to foment of fascist rebellion. 

As we used to say back in the Deep South, where I was born in 1951 and grew up, Never Again! A few years ago, I wrote a novel about it:   King of Soul

Listen to my new third-verse for our National Anthem:  

Star-spangled Capitol